person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!
This, exactly.
Discord sucks at what it wasn’t designed to do… Shocker. That doesn’t make it bad.
It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I’ve seen, and buggy af. It’s barely gotten any better too.
i mean, it’s far from perfect, but as someone that’s been using video/voice clients since before there was a commercial solution, what is better? i haven’t found it.
Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?
Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They’re entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.
Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its… fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.
The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds…
I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me “this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it”.
I left that server right away.
Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can’t show up in a search engine
Greatly improved usability, while still greatly hurting searchability, in that common bugs are still hidden away from indexable sight.
Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I’ll never have a discord for a project because I don’t want to answer the same questions over and over.
Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.
I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.
Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, “Did you read the pins you fucking noob?” mentality. It’s very much the old forum kneejerk response of, “Did you read the rules/stickied posts?” simply in a different context. As you note though, you’ll find assholes in any communication medium.
Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that’s also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server’s more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord’s inbox/mentions can be.
